The term ‘plain’ traverses the depth-psychology corpus along two largely independent axes, each with its own symbolic freight. In the mythological and epic registers — Homer, Plato’s Critias, and Campbell’s comparative mythology — the plain functions as a liminal topographic zone: the arena of combat, the site of cosmic conflagration, the cultivated and measured space that stands in productive tension with mountain, sea, and underworld. Hephaestus sets ‘the plain alight’ in the Iliad; Plato’s Atlantean plain is a geometrically ordered, humanly labored landscape that mirrors the ordered psyche of an ideal civilization; Campbell’s ‘plain of heaven’ is the cosmic stage on which divine concealment and revelation are enacted. In a secondary, methodological register — surfacing in Lattimore’s translatorial manifesto and Thompson’s critique of Dawkins — ‘plain’ operates as an epistemological claim: to be ‘plain and direct in thought and expression’ (Arnold’s criterion for Homer, cited by Lattimore) is an aesthetic and ethical demand, while Thompson’s ironic deployment of ‘the plain truth’ to refute genetic literalism exposes how claims to plainness can mask metaphysical assumptions. The concordance entry thus maps a field in which spatial, symbolic, and epistemological senses of the term intersect, making ‘plain’ a surprisingly revealing index of how these traditions negotiate clarity, order, and elemental power.
Hephaestus readied the immortal blaze, and first he set the plain alight, then burned the multitude of corpses in the river… so the plain was all dried up, and all the corpses burned.
The plain serves here as the primary site of divine elemental warfare, its parching and incineration enacting the boundary between mortal and immortal domains.
, The Iliad, 2023thesis
the country immediately about and surrounding the city was a level plain, itself surrounded by mountains which descended towards the sea; it was smooth and even, and of an oblong shape
Plato’s Atlantean plain is presented as a cosmically and politically ordered landscape, shaped by both nature and royal labor, whose measured geometry mirrors the ideal organisation of civilized power.
, Critias, -360thesis
Homer must bear in mind four qualities of his author: that he is rapid, plain and direct in thought and expression, plain and direct in substance, and noble.
Lattimore, invoking Arnold, establishes ‘plain’ as a normative aesthetic and ethical criterion for Homeric translation, linking directness of expression to the poem’s fundamental character.
, The Iliad of Homer, 2011thesis
This disavowal of metaphor is indefensible. The plain truth is that DNA is not a program for building organisms.
Thompson deploys ‘the plain truth’ as a rhetorical counter-stroke against Dawkins’s literalism, exposing how claims to unmediated plainness are themselves metaphorically and ideologically loaded.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
Thereupon both the plain of high heaven and the central land of reed plains again were light.
Campbell cites the Japanese myth of Amaterasu to show the plain of heaven as a cosmic arena whose darkness or illumination registers the presence or withdrawal of the solar divine.
, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 2015thesis
I saw them in the lead towards the turn, but now I cannot see them anywhere and I have looked across the Trojan plain.
The Trojan plain functions as a field of visibility and contest, a space of heroic scrutiny where fortune, speed, and loss are read at a distance.
, The Iliad, 2023supporting
ireSiov (Tricoj’): plain; the freq. gen. TTicioio with verbs of motion is local, on, over, or through the plain. ircSiovSe: to the plain, earthward
The Homeric lexicon establishes the plain (pedion) as a directional and spatial constant in epic language, consistently oriented downward from mountain or heaven toward the earthly field of action.
, Homeric Dictionarysupporting
across the plain: The Epeans are crossing the plain in search of plunder.
Editorial annotation grounds the plain as a zone of military transit and economic predation, clarifying its functional role within the Iliad’s geography.
, The Iliad, 2023supporting
it is plain that the development of a good character through immersion in kala is also perceived as beneficial to the child: it is the acquisition of psychic health.
Hobbs uses ‘plain’ in its epistemological sense — evident, unmistakable — to assert the transparency of Plato’s argument connecting aesthetic beauty to psychic formation.
, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000aside
A servant followed along behind us carrying a plain wooden bucket, the kind that contains a five-bushel load of rice.
Hakuin’s use of ‘plain’ to describe the unadorned rice bucket signals an aesthetic of monastic simplicity consistent with Zen’s valorisation of the ordinary.
, Wild Ivy: The Spiritual Autobiography of Zen Master Hakuin, 1999aside